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Preface

Volume 8 in the chronological edition of the writings of Charles S. Peirce is part of a projected 30-volume series initiated in 1975 under the leadership of Max H. Fisch and Edward C. Moore. The edition is selective but comprehensive and includes all writings, on any subject, believed to shed significant light on the development of Peirce’s thought. The selections are edited according to the guidelines of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, and present a critical, unmodernized rendering of Peirce’s published and unpublished work in a clear text format. The “Essay on Editorial Theory and Method” provides a full discussion of the editorial procedures used in establishing the texts for this volume.

There have been three refinements in presentation since volume production began thirty years ago. The first two volumes (1982, 1984) centered on the philosophical writings in logic and metaphysics that predominated in the development of Peirce’s thought during the early years of his career. Only the most significant technical papers appeared in these initial volumes. Beginning with volume 3 (1986), the selection process was broadened to include more of the scientific, mathematical, and historical writings that, along with his philosophical papers, document the development of his thought across an ever-widening range of disciplines throughout the rest of his life.

The second stage of editorial refinement first appeared in volume 4 (1989) and involved presentation of the editorial material. Textual information was consolidated in the editorial apparatus for each selection, resulting in a clearer distinction between that apparatus and the content notes that precede it in its own section, along with the bibliography and the chronological list of Peirce’s manuscripts. Volume 5 (1993) was the last volume formatted by off-site printers; presswork for volume 6 (2000) reflected in-house advances in computing technology and a third evolution in editorial presentation that both adapts and extends the bibliographical achievements of earlier scholars. The chronological catalogs now number Peirce’s writings in their order of composition year by year, after the style of the Burks catalog in Volume 8 of the Collected Papers, and manuscripts are now identified by their Robin numbers (for Harvard’s Houghton Library collection) or by standard archive identifiers (for other collections). The preface to volume 6 and the introduction to volume 6’s chronological catalog provide a full explanation of the manuscript references now in use.

Publication of consecutive chronological volumes will continue to be the backbone of the series, but the Peirce Edition Project’s continuing shift toward parallel volume editing sometimes leads to out-of-sequence publication for special volumes in the series. The present volume reflects the first stage of this transition. Volume 8 covers the period from the spring of 1890 to mid-summer 1892 and continues directly from the period covered by volume 6 (fall 1886 to spring 1890). Peirce’s wide-ranging work preparing or refining thousands of definitions for the Century Dictionary spans both volume periods, but it is too vast to be represented adequately in either; the general chronological sequence will be bridged at a later date by volume 7, which will be devoted to the lexicographical work that occupied Peirce as much as any other project principally during the late 1880s and early 1890s, and then intermittently over a dozen more years.

The Preface to volume 6 prepared readers for this slight departure from the strict chronological production and outlined our plan to prepare volume 7 out of sequence. Since then, Indiana University’s Peirce Edition Project has formed an editorial partnership with what has now become the “Projet d’Édition Peirce” at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) to prepare volume 7’s dictionary texts. Under the direction of Professor François Latraverse, the PEP-UQAM faculty and staff editors have been working under two successive grants awarded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to identify, transcribe, edit, and lay out the definitions preserved in Peirce’s Harvard papers. Scholars affiliated with the University of Bamberg, working under a similar government grant awarded to Professor Helmut Pape by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, worked for several years on the 1903 Lowell Lectures and managed to both organize and transcribe their entire manuscript base; the result of their work will prove of considerable assistance when the Project eventually begins preparing and editing volume 22. Project editors assume supervisory editorial and production responsibilities for these volumes even as parallel work continues on other volumes in the series. Volumes that contain single works or unified series of lectures, such as “How to Reason” (volume 11), are also candidates for out-of-sequence publication. Volume 11 has been in the works for quite some time and is scheduled to appear a year or so after volume 9.

Changes in editorial content made in volume 6 have been continued with good effect in volume 8. The most significant of these involve expansion of the Annotations (Editorial Notes in volumes 1–3; Notes in volumes 4–5). In both volumes 6 and 8, the Annotations section is more comprehensive and includes significant quotations from Peirce’s preliminary drafts, variant fragments and working notes that were not selected for publication in the edition. The Chronological Catalog (Chronological List in volumes 1–5) also includes more information about writings of the volume period that were not selected for publication.

One further change in presentation is reflected in volume 8’s use of the Times font in place of the Caledonia family of fonts employed in the production of earlier volumes. As a result of this change, volume 8 holds more lines per page than volume 6 but preserves the readability of all previous volumes. Another reason for choosing the Times font was that it more effectively blends with the fonts used for scientific, logical, and mathematical characters. This font change, however, is merely transitional; in the longer run the Project intends to switch to another font that combines similar attributes with greater aesthetic appeal.

Taken together, these minor realignments and extensions of editorial matter and the recent modifications to volume design make it easier to navigate Peirce’s texts as well as the scholarship that documents their compositional and editing history. The editors have not changed the fundamental methods put in place early on to establish reliable texts for Peirce’s interdisciplinary writings, many of which never reached print (or even fair copy form) during his lifetime. As in earlier volumes, the texts of the volume 8 period are carefully annotated and are supported by an apparatus that lists historical variations and identifies all editorial emendations. The refinement of presentation outlined above is a natural progression for a series of this scope; in making these changes, the editors have been attentive to the need for continuity with the earlier volumes of the edition, and hope that readers will make their way seamlessly into Peirce’s writings of the 1890s—a decade that would prove to be the most stressful period of his life.

A special episode of editorial history deserves notice, for it explains why a particular expectation placed upon this volume could not in the end be fulfilled. Until the beginning of 2007, the press-work for volume 8 contained 59 selections instead of the current 56. The last three selections consisted of three untitled poems that Peirce hand-wrote some time in the spring of 1892, and that were eventually placed in folder R 1565 of the Harvard Peirce Papers (see entry 1892.94 in this volume’s Chronological Catalog). Besides the material artifact itself, with its penned alterations, and a related entry on an interleaf of Peirce’s copy of the Century Dictionary, there had been several reasons that made Peirce’s authorship of these poems seem plausible, including the fact that none of the experts consulted nor any of our extensive electronic searches could provide an alternate identification. In early January 2007, however, an obscure book that was part of the holdings of the New York Public Library was digitized and made searchable on-line as part of the collaborative partnership between that library and Google Books Library Project. A subsequent Internet search revealed this book as the true source of the poems, and thus we finally learned that Peirce’s daring poetic experiment had never taken place. The poems came from an anonymous book titled Sand Key (The Key to All) printed in London by the Chiswick Press in 1890 (see the Bibliography of Peirce’s References under “Anonymous”). The book appears to be a private publication, and the few copies so far located are all found in U.S. libraries. Peirce’s transcription of the poems (excerpted from the beginning of the book’s first part, “The Figure of True Representation”) contains a few modifications affecting punctuation and even the wording of some verses. We subsequently discovered that even these modifications could not be attributed to Peirce. Another copy of Sand Key was identified through Google Books, this time from the Widener Library at Harvard University. That copy’s inscriptions indicate that it was once the property of Harvard’s Dean of Theology, Prof. Charles Carroll Everett (1829–1900). Everett’s copy contains many inked alterations throughout, all presumably in the poet’s hand (not Everett’s hand), and Peirce’s modifications precisely match those alterations. We can therefore infer that some time in the spring of 1892, likely toward the end of May when he was in Cambridge, Peirce visited Everett, was shown the curious book, and, struck by its unusual content, asked to transcribe a few passages. Everett must have known the anonymous author pretty well—perhaps it was a student of his, since Everett also taught and wrote about poetry—but efforts to identify that person have so far failed. At any rate, if Peirce’s interest may serve as a recommendation, Sand Key is in several regards a highly original avant-garde production, well deserving of the attention of poetry scholars.

The strong institutional support provided by Indiana University, our host institution, continues to make production of these volumes possible. Former IUPUI Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of Faculties William M. Plater and former Deans Herman Saatkamp and Robert White of the School of Liberal Arts led a successful campaign to establish the Peirce Project as a major component of the Institute for American Thought. Our current Dean, William A. Blomquist, shares his predecessors’ conviction that our operation is central to the School’s mission, and we are grateful for his staunch backing. The University’s steady support for the core staff positions of the Peirce Edition has been instrumental in securing continuous federal and private-sector grant commitments during the period that this volume was researched, edited and published. The edition’s technical staff members, who have made in-house volume preparation a reality, have been supported to a large degree through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are especially grateful to many individuals who have demonstrated their support by making private contributions through the Indiana University Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities matching grant challenges. Among them we owe special marks of gratitude to the late Arthur Burks and his wife Alice, to Emily Maverick, Janice Deledalle-Rhodes, Paul and Catherine Nagy, and Charls and Claire Pearson. Gail Plater, Assistant Dean for Development & External Affairs in the School of Liberal Arts, has worked tirelessly to coordinate matching grants and develop new fundraising initiatives for volume production. We thank Gail and her Associate Director, Gen Shaker, for spotlighting the Peirce Edition in annual university fund drives and launching new development initiatives.

Acknowledgement is due as well to the Harvard University Department of Philosophy for permission to use the original manuscripts, and to the officers of the Houghton Library, especially Manuscripts Curator Leslie Morris, for their cooperation regarding the Charles S. Peirce Papers. We owe a great deal of thanks as well to Jennie Rathbun and Susan Halpert of the Houghton Reading Room staff, who coordinated several of our proofreading trips to the Harvard Peirce papers. Jennie Rathbun also worked (with the assistance of Tom Ford) to arrange and process the photographic orders for the Harvard manuscript illustrations in this volume.

Research for volume 8 brought us into the period when Peirce began to write for the Monist and Open Court journals edited by Dr. Paul Carus for Edward Hegeler’s Open Court Company in LaSalle, Illinois. The archives of these philosophical journals are now in the Special Collections Research Center of the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, and we are grateful to former Special Collections Dean David Koch and his successor Director Pam Hackbart-Dean, as well as to archivists Katie Salzmann and Karen Drickamer, for arranging access and permissions to publish from Peirce’s submitted manuscripts. Diane Worrell of Special Collections was instrumental in providing electronic images for the volume’s Monist series manuscript illustrations.

Special thanks go to many individual scholars who have provided important research support, including Webb Dordick, who worked with our proofreading teams on location at the Houghton and provided general bibliographical research assistance in the Houghton and other Harvard libraries; Professor José Vericat, for assistance in identifying the editions of reference books used by Peirce; to the Interlibrary Loan department of IUPUI’s University Library for facilitating our bibliographical research; to graduate assistants Tara Morrall and Michelle Boardman, who helped significantly with the electronic aspects of volume production, and Kelly Tully-Needler, who started out as a graduate assistant before joining the Peirce Edition’s full-time staff for a two-year stint; to student assistants Brandy Yeager, Somer Taylor, and Stephen J. Reynolds who helped proofread the volume; and to Adam A. Kovach and Jack Musselman of the Department of Philosophy, Indiana University (Bloomington), who are now pursuing postdoctoral careers. More distant scholars have also provided help with specific selections, including Professors William B. Jensen and Charles Seibert, University of Cincinnati, who worked with Peirce’s review of “The Periodic Law”; Dr. Irving Anellis, for annotations related to several logic selections; Professor Kelly Parker, Grand Valley State University, Michigan, for his work with Peirce’s Monist paper on “The Law of Mind”; Professor James Wible, University of New Hampshire, who advised on Peirce’s Nation review of Pearson’s Grammar of Science; Professor Saap Mansfeld, University of Utrecht, for contributions to “The Architecture of Theories”; Daniel Rellstab, University of Bern, Switzerland, Mathias Girel, University of Paris I, Sorbonne, and Professor Fritz Nagel, a Bernoulli Edition editor, for annotations research involving various Monist selections.

Eight individuals provided important background research and advice as we edited Peirce’s novella “Embroidered Thessaly”: Professor Thomas Acton, University of Greenwich, for his assistance with Peirce’s use of the Romani language; Professors Robert and Susan Sutton of IUPUI, Professor Kiriake Xerohemona, Florida International University, Niki Watts of TransLexis Corporation, and Professors Sara F. Barrena and Joaquin Albaycin of the University of Navarra, Spain, for detailed information on Greek culture and Greek language during Peirce’s sojourn in Thessaly; and independent scholar Thom Carlson, who attributed a key editorial by Peirce that helped establish a date for Peirce’s later phase of work on the Thessalian novella.

We are indebted to the Texas Tech University Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism (ISP) for permission to use duplicates of its annotated photocopy of the Harvard Peirce papers. Professor Kenneth L. Ketner, director of the ISP, also provided microfilm reels of the New York Evening Post archives that enabled us to confirm and examine seldom-seen reprints of Peirce’s Nation reviews from this period. Members of the Charles S. Peirce Society, as well as the editors of the Society’s Transactions, have been a constant source of support and scholarly information. Although Peirce’s use of the typewriter diminished significantly as his work with the Coast Survey drew to a close, we nonetheless found the original Hammond typewriter documentation provided by Professor Peter Weil of the University of Delaware important as we analyzed Peirce’s typescripts of the period. We are also grateful to Professor Richard Polt of Xavier University (Cincinnati) for extending our knowledge of the Hammond machine and its inventor. The Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE) continues to be of great assistance to the series, and we owe thanks to former CSE co-chair Professor Morris Eaves, University of Rochester, for coordinating the seal inspection, and to current chair David Nicholls, University of Southampton, and committee member Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California, for finalizing it. We are especially grateful to Dr. David S. Shields, McClintock Professor of Southern Letters, University of South Carolina, for conducting the inspection on behalf of the CSE.

We are also grateful to the contributing editors listed on the series page of this volume for the specialized scholarship they brought to bear on many of the selections. Special thanks go to our former technical editor Leah Cummins Guinn, who transcribed, corrected, and text-encoded many of the volume 8 selections. The executive support of Martha Rujuwa and administrative assistance of Kara Peterson have been essential behind-the-scenes factors in our work. Throughout the period of volume preparation, we were fortunate to have the expert counsel of the late Arthur Burks of the University of Michigan and Don Cook of Indiana University, Bloomington, emeriti professors who have served many years as advisory editors for the Peirce Project, and Dr. Thomas L. Short, who has provided outstanding support as Advisory Board chair from January 2001 through February 2009. The late Max Fisch devoted half a century to Peirce research, and his books and papers now form the archival foundation of the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI. His work and inspiration live on through this research facility and through the work of the editors who call it home.